Every specialist term used anywhere in this course, in plain language first.

Subnet

A group of computers competing at one specific job, with its own rules for deciding who did that job well.

Validator

A participant whose role is to judge other participants' work and report scores.

Miner

A participant who does the subnet's actual job and submits the result to be judged.

TAO

Bittensor's own currency. New TAO is what the network mints and pays out to reward useful work; it is not created or issued by any single company.

Subnet owner

The account that registers a subnet and writes its rules: what counts as good work, and how that work gets judged.

Stake

Money committed behind a participant — usually a validator — that increases how much say and reward that participant gets, and that can earn less if the participant judges badly.

Root network

A shared pool where money is committed to the network as a whole, rather than to one specific subnet. It has no competitors of its own, but money placed there still counts toward judging power on every subnet, and still earns a share of every subnet's payout.

Alpha

Each subnet's own currency, separate from every other subnet's. It trades against TAO inside that one subnet's own small market, and moving TAO in or out of that market is how someone gets alpha or gives it back.

Emission

The flow of newly created currency the network pays out to whoever builds, does, and judges work.

Weight

A validator's judgment of how good one miner's work is, written as a share of that validator's total judgment across every miner it is grading — not a fixed score, but a proportion.

Yuma Consensus

The network's rule for combining every validator's separate judgments about the same subnet into one official ranking, which then decides how much everyone on that subnet earns.

dTAO

A change made in 2025 that lets each subnet's own currency price — set by ordinary buying and selling — decide how big a share of the network's daily payout that subnet receives, rather than the share being set by a vote or a central decision.

Nominator

Someone who commits stake behind a validator instead of judging anything themselves, and is paid a share of what that validator earns for judging well.

Timelock encryption

Encryption that cannot be undone until a public, verifiable clock elsewhere reaches a set moment — not even the person who encrypted it can open it early.

Root proportion

How much of a subnet's own judging power, at a given moment, comes from money staked into the root network rather than staked directly into that subnet's own token.

Rank disagreement

A flag a snapshot raises when a subnet's rank by earnings and its rank by number of token holders point in very different directions — a sign that how much a subnet pays and how many people hold its token are not telling the same story.

Conviction

A time-weighted claim a participant builds by locking stake behind one hotkey, used to decide who controls a subnet. Ownership of an eligible subnet passes to whichever hotkey holds the largest share of conviction in its own name, not the combined locks of everyone who happens to be backing it.

Emission gate

A threshold in how emission is paid out, based on a subnet's rank by price. A subnet above the threshold earns close to what flat price-based emission would have paid it; a subnet below it earns sharply less, even though no subnet is technically cut off from emission altogether.

Root basket

An escrowed holding of subnet alpha that a root validator accumulates on a staker's behalf, instead of that staker's share being sold off to plain currency automatically. A staker who backs that validator can claim their portion of it whenever they choose.

Linked order

A trade whose size is set from the actual result of an earlier trade, rather than a fixed amount decided in advance — letting someone chain, say, a sale into a stake without knowing beforehand exactly how much the first trade will produce.

Liquid alpha

A subnet setting that smooths how quickly a validator's recorded trust in each miner updates, using a running average instead of jumping straight to a newly set value. A subnet owner can drive that average from the current epoch's results (Current), the previous epoch's (Previous), or — the default — Auto, which uses the previous epoch's results only when the maximum bonds penalty applies and the current epoch's otherwise.

EVM

A second way to call into the chain, alongside the network's own native transactions: a Solidity smart contract can read chain state or trigger the same actions a wallet could, through a fixed set of addresses the chain exposes for that purpose. Every rule that would apply to a native call — who is allowed to do it, rate limits, and the rest — still applies when the call arrives this way.

Multisig

An account controlled by more than one key, where a set number of the group's signers — not necessarily all of them — must each separately approve an action before the chain will execute it.

Spec version

The number the chain's own software carries to identify which set of rules it is currently running. Each numbered runtime release bumps this number, and it is how anything reading the chain can tell which version of the rules produced what it sees.